Shakespeare's Religious and Moral Thinking: Skepticism or Suspicion?

The University of Notre Dame

Shakespeare's Religious and Moral Thinking: Skepticism or Suspicion?Author(s): John D. CoxSource: Religion & Literature, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Spring, 2004), pp. 39-66Published by: The University of Notre DameStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40059941 .

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SHAKESPEARE'S RELIGIOUS AND MORAL THINKING: SKEPTICISM OR SUSPICION?

John D. Cox

A long and distinguished tradition, beginning perhaps with Wordsworth and still very much alive, insists that Shakespeare was not a religious thinker, but a secular one.1 An even older tradition insists that he was not a thinker at all but merely (in Milton's carefully crafted damnation with faint praise) "sweetest Shakespeare, fancy's child, / Warblfing] his native woodnotes wild."2 Those who have acknowledged Shakespeare's thinking have naturally tended to emphasize ideas - their heritage, their development in the Renaissance, their status as propositions in the history of Western philosophy - and a further tendency can be discerned to catego- rize Shakespeare as either an idealist or a skeptic. A classic review of Shakespeare's religious thinking thus emphasizes "doctrine" in its title, and William Elton's influential study of skepticism in King Lear identifies four characteristic propositions of Renaissance "atheism" that organize, according to Elton, the play's characters, attitudes, and action.3

What I would like to do in this essay is to shift the discussion of Shakespeare's thinking in two ways. First, I want to suggest that the dichotomy between idealism and skepticism is too sharply drawn, because both seem to be operating at nearly all times in his plays and poems. Second, I want to overcome this dichotomy specifically by focusing on behavior and apparent motive, whose function in dramatic texts is rela- tively easier to discern and describe than that of religious and moral ideas. With this shift in focus, the operative contrast is not between skepticism

R&L 36.1 (Spring 2004) 39



40 Religion & Literature

and knowledge but between suspicion and faith, to borrow the terms of the contemporary philosopher, Merold Westphal. Skepticism, Westphal points out, "is directed toward the elusiveness of things, while suspicion is directed toward the evasiveness of consciousness. Skepticism seeks to overcome the opacity of facts, while suspicion seeks to uncover the duplicity of persons. Skepticism addresses itself directly to the propositions believed and asks whether there is sufficient evidence to make belief rational. Suspicion addresses itself to the persons who believe and only indirectly to the propositions believed."4 Suspicion, I want to suggest, is evident in Shakespeare's plays and poems from beginning to end, and it is distinguishable from its nineteenth-century counterparts in Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, by a consistent if sometimes elusive contrast, in Shakespeare's own writing, between suspicion on one hand and faith and trust on the other.5

Westphal's distinction is particularly useful for the late sixteenth century, because suspicion was more fully developed then than skepticism. With regard to Shakespeare in particular, the skeptical authorities most often cited are Montaigne, Reginald Scot, and Samuel Harsnett - the last two being special cases regarding demonic effects in particular.6 Both Scot and Harsnett, however, were supportive members of the English church (Harsnett was secretary to Richard Bancroft, Bishop of London, in 1603, when he published the book that influenced King Lear), and their efforts make more sense as defenses of that church in the context of ecclesiastical politics of the late sixteenth century than as skeptical attacks on belief per se of the kind mounted much later by David Hume.7 Many more authorities are cited by William Elton, in his reading of King Lear as a reflection of contemporary "atheism," but Elton does not cite any positive defenses of skepticism in English: all his examples are rejections of the ideas Elton finds in Shakespeare. This is not to say that King Lear could not espouse or embody what others rejected, of course. Shakespeare's contemporary and fellow playwright, Christopher Marlowe, seems to have done just that, but Marlowe's own skepticism was manifestly primitive, at least as reported by others.8 Moreover, Shakespeare was not reported to have held such ideas himself, and he wrote very different plays from Marlowe from the outset. The late sixteenth century did know a particular kind of striking and influential skepticism in the writing of Machiavelli, who was also uni- formly rejected by English writers, even when they practiced his principles at the same time: "But such as loue me, gard me from their tongues," as Marlowe's own portrayal of "Macheuil" puts it {The Jew of Malta, Pro- logue, 6). But Machiavelli illustrates the distinction Westphal makes be-



JOHN D. COX 41

tween skepticism and suspicion, because Machiavelli did not address the classic skeptical issues in epistemology and religion - the kind of issues that Hume would eventually develop with skill and insight; rather, Machiavelli addressed politics, or the behavior and motives of people who exercise political power. Machiavelli may well have been an atheist; he was certainly accused of it by his critics, whose jibes Marlowe puts in the mouth of his Machevil: "I count Religion but a childish Toy, / And hold there is no sinne but Ignorance" (14-15). But Machiavelli was less inter- ested in religious questions than in their irrelevance to actual political behavior - to routine political actions that implicitly reject ethical claims, even if they are the actions of religious people - an insight born of interest in human actions and motive, not primarily in epistemology.

Machiavelli was not the only sophisticated example of suspicion in the late sixteenth century. Westphal argues that the Bible itself supplied a strong basis for mistrust of human motives, citing Jeremiah 17.9 as an example: "The heart is deceitful and wicked aboue all things, who can knowe it?" More relevant for a dramatist, perhaps, were narratives that turned on suspicion, both in the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testa- ment. The story of King David is a case in point, because it is so bleakly political and so frank about the failings of its principal subject, who is nonetheless introduced, in the words of the prophet Samuel, as "a man after [the Lord's] owne heart" (1 Samuel 13.14). The hand of God is seldom evident in David's story - in contrast say, to the stories of the patriarchs and the judges - and David's shabby treatment of Uriah the Hittite and his wife Bathsheba is an extraordinary revelation of lust, abuse of power, lying, deceit, treachery, and judicial murder on the part of Israel's greatest king (2 Samuel 1 1). David's story most strikingly illustrates suspicion in the king's response to Nathan the prophet after Uriah's death. Nathan tells David a parable whose injustice elicits the king's moral indignation: "Then Dauid was exceeding wrothe with the man [who acted unjustly in the parable], and said to Nathan, As the Lord liueth, the man that hath done this thing, shal surely dye" (2 Samuel 12.5). Having be- haved much more oppressively than the man in the parable, David nonetheless condemns him out of hand, deceiving himself about the disparity between his own actions and his indignation with someone else. Nathan boldly springs the rhetorical and moral trap he has carefully set: "Then Nathan said to Dauid, Thou art the man" (12.7).

This story is striking in its recognition not only of suspicion (its frankness about David's capacity for abusing power and deceiving himself) but also of faith - David's instant recognition of what he has done and his




response to Nathan's admonition: "Then Dauid said vnto Nathan, I haue sinned against the Lord. And Nathan said vnto Dauid, The Lord also hathe put away thy sinne, thou shalt not dye" (12.13). A story that spares nothing in its examination of self-deception about wretched motives and worse actions thus includes also the possibility of forgiveness and hope, as the official Elizabethan homily pointed out: "afterwards he fell horribly, committing most detestable adultery and murder: and yet, as soon as he cried, Peccavi, I have sinned unto the Lord [sic], his sin being forgiven he was received into favour again."9

The story of David and Bathsheba is particularly helpful as a Tudor example of suspicion, because George Peele turned it into drama in the late 1580s or early 1590s, and it was published in 1599, when Shakespeare had been active in the London theater world for about ten years.10 Peele unsurprisingly interprets David as Adam-like in his fall and a proto- Christian in his repentance, because that is how the Christian tradition had long understood the story (Ewbank). More important for present purposes is Peele's addition of political realism to the story, as a gloss on suspicion in the story itself. Inspired only by the biblical narrator's "Then Dauid sent messengers" (2 Samuel 1 1 .4), Peele invents a royal servant called Cusay, who mouths the truths of state to pressure Bethsabe into consent:

David (thou knowest faire dame) is wise and just, Elected to the heart of Israel's God, Then doe not thou expostulate with him For any action that contents his soul. (102-05)

Cusay is a political hatchet man - almost certainly based on what Peele knew of Elizabethan court politics - who creatively translates royal com- mands into coercive actions without questioning their implications. One of Peele's most effective additions to his source is a scene in which Cusay and Absalon follow David's orders to make Urias drunk so that he will sleep with Bethsabe (495-55 1). Their sniggering asides, laden with irony at Urias's expense, effectively evoke the smug hypocrisy of misused power.

Sayings and stories illustrate suspicion in the New Testament as well. Both Matthew and Luke report Jesus' reproof of those who ignore the "beam" in their own eye while pointing out the "mote" in their neighbor's eye (Matthew 7.3-4 and Luke 6.41-42). In Matthew this saying immediately follows, and is linked thematically to, the saying that provided the title of one of Shakespeare's most suspicious comedies, Measure for Measure: "Ivdge not, that ye be not iudged. For with what iudgement ye iudge, ye



JOHN D. COX 43

shal be iudged, and with what measure ye mette, it shal be measured to you againe." Matthew also reports a parable of misused power on the part of a servant who begged to be forgiven a debt of ten thousand talents (identified as "three score pound" in the Geneva gloss), and barely escaped being sold into slavery with his entire family when his master forgave the debt (18.23-27). Yet the servant's response was to find "one of his felowes, which oght him an hundreth pence [Geneva gloss: Which amounteth of our money to the sume of 25 shillings, or verie nere], & he layed hands on him, and toke him by the throte, saying, Pay me that thou owest." When the second debtor begged for mercy, the servant would not listen but had him imprisoned till the debt was paid. Hearing of his servant's hypocrisy, his master threw the servant himself in jail "til he shulde pay all that was due to him." The point of the story, according to Matthew, is not only that people impose intolerable burdens on one another but that liberation from such behavior is possible if one is willing to forgive: "So likewise shal mine heauenlie Father do vnto you, except ye forgiue from your hearts, eche one to his brother their trespaces" (Matthew 18.35). Even a desultory Elizabe- than churchgoer would have heard in this story, and especially in its conclusion, an echo of the frequently recited "Lord's prayer," as translated in the Book of Common Prayer, "And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass aeainst us."11

In short, the models Shakespeare's culture offered for suspecting human motives and actions were more pervasive, sophisticated, and compelling than contemporary skepticism, and the source of suspicion was not primarily skepticism but faith - the very faith into which everyone was baptized. Machiavelli was infamous for his godless suspicion, but suspicion just as profound and very closely akin to Hobbes's was available in no less respected an authority than Saint Augustine.12 The English theologian Richard Hooker has often been cited as a parallel to Shakespeare's recognition of an ideal hierarchy in human affairs and the cosmos, but Hooker's way of reading the Bible, as Debora Shuger has recently argued, was so suspicious of "emotional delusion" and "subjective projection" that it effectively demystified "spiritual" interpretation of the kind that had prevailed at least since St. Augustine.13 To be sure, Hooker developed this kind of exegesis as a polemical move to resist pressure from Puritan reformers, but it nonetheless shows the compatibility of belief with what might well be taken for skepticism in Shakespeare's culture.14 Indeed, Hooker's demystifying biblical hermeneutic bears more than passing re- semblance to the skeptical arguments of Harsnett and Scot regarding demons. Common to all three is the Reformation assertion that "miracles




are ceased," in the words of Shakespeare's archbishop of Canterbury in Henry F(1.1.68). Originally formulated to bolster arguments against tran- substantiation, this assertion functioned equally well to undercut Catholic and Puritan authority in exorcising or dispossessing demons and in inter- preting the Bible.

Where the moral use of suspicion is concerned, Shakespeare is closest to the biblical paradigm in his "comedies of forgiveness," as R. G. Hunter called them, which recur throughout his career.15 The earliest of these, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, contains an example of suspicious behavior that is as compelling as any in Shakespeare. One of the two gentlemen is aptly named Proteus, after the infinitely changeable god of the sea in classical legend, because he betrays not only his sweetheart, Julia, but also his friend, Valentine, by giving in to an obsessive desire for Valentine's sweetheart, Silvia, almost as soon as he lays eyes on her.16 In a soliloquy of forty- three lines, Proteus rationalizes this "three-fold perjury," begging "sweet- suggesting Love, if thou hast sinned, / Teach me, thy tempted subject, to excuse it!" (2.6.7-8). It is a remarkable exercise in self-deception, con- stantly repeating "I" and "myself" in justifying what he knows he should not do:

I cannot leave to love, and yet I do; But there I leave to love where I should love. Julia I lose, and Valentine I lose. If I keep them, I needs must lose myself. If I lose them, thus find I by their loss For Valentine, myself; for Julia, Silvia. I to myself am dearer than a friend, For love is still most precious in itself, And Silvia - witness Heaven, that made her fair! - Shows Julia but a swarthy Ethiop. (2.6. 1 7-26)

His language betrays a self-preoccupation that masquerades, in his own consciousness, as devotion to Silvia, while unconsciously revealing itself in a racist slur directed against the woman he is betraying. Giving his myopia full rein, Proteus concocts a plan for betraying Valentine and reveals a facility for lying cleverly to the duke, Silvia's father, about his commitment to "the law of friendship" as he puts the treachery into effect (3. 1 .4-5). It is not clear who is more deceived by these lies - the duke or Proteus himself.

The resolution of problems caused principally by Proteus's willful duplicity follows a dramatic pattern that was well established by the time Shakespeare inherited it. As in other comedies of forgiveness, the pattern in Two Gentlemen is that problems are resolved in the denouement by the



JOHN D. COX 45

willingness of one character to acknowledge a fault and ask forgiveness and the willingness of another to grant it. In Two Gentlemen the character who acknowledges his perfidy is Proteus:

My shame and guilt confounds me. Forgive me, Valentine. If hearty sorrow Be a sufficient ransom for offense, I tender 't here. I do as truly suffer As e'er I did commit. (5.4.73-77)

Valentine's reply makes clear that this incident, while unique, is also generic, deriving from the same pattern, for example, that Peele also used in David and Bethsabe:

Then am I paid, And once again I do receive thee honest. Who by repentance is not satisfied Is nor of heaven nor earth, for these are pleas'd. By penitence th' Eternal's wrath's appeas'd. (77-81)

Hunter comments: "Proteus informs Valentine that he has experienced 'hearty sorrow' - contrition - for his sin. Valentine replies, with complete orthodoxy, that contrition alone makes satisfaction for sin, and that the wrath of the God of Judgment is appeased by repentance. Sinful man must prove worthy of his own ultimate forgiveness by pardoning those who trespass against him" (86-87). The moral pattern of Two Gentlemen is thus inseparable from an age-old religious pattern.

The difficulty most auditors have with this reading of Two Gentlemen is resolvable if we are willing to follow suspicion where it leads us. The difficulty in question is that Valentine complicates his forgiveness with a strange and incomprehensible gesture. Proteus's self-recognition and repentance had been precipitated by Valentine's unexpected discovery of Proteus as Proteus was trying to rape Silvia. Valentine is so impressed with Proteus's change of heart, however, that he offers to yield Silvia to his friend after all: "And, that my love may appear plain and free, / All that was mine in Silvia I give thee" (82-83). This offer is completely unsatisfac- tory. Not only does it reward Proteus for the very thing he has just repented (his perfidy and his lust for Silvia), but it also reckons entirely without Silvia's feelings in the matter, since her lover offers her, without consulting her, to the man who had been trying to rape her. Moreover, Valentine's gesture also offends Julia (though Valentine is unaware of this effect), who




observes the proceedings in disguise as Proteus's manservant. What is she to do if Proteus accepts Valentine's well-intended but wrongheaded offer?

These difficulties are so manifest that they cannot be excused as idealistic but awkward effects of Valentine's pure-hearted friendship. So to excuse them is to miss another kind of suspicious behavior in this play (and thus, in effect, to participate in it) - not the duplicity of solipsistic self- indulgence but the cruelty and thoughtlessness of inappropriate idealism. The one who recognizes this is Julia, who resourcefully takes steps to redress it. She responds to Valentine's wrongheaded magnanimity with two moves: first, she makes a gesture of silent dismay (most editors say she "swoons," but the only early text of this play has no stage direction at this point, and it seems just as likely that she feigns to swoon or does anything else that breaks the spell of high-minded male self-preoccupation). Her gesture, whatever it is, has the effect of preventing Proteus's reply to Valentine's awkward offer and turning attention from the two gentlemen to herself. Having interrupted them effectively, she makes her second move: she "mistakenly" offers the "wrong" ring to Proteus when he asks for it - not the one he had given her to give to Silvia but the one he had given her in token of his faithful love to her. When he recognizes this ring, she produces the one he had ordered her to give to Silvia and reveals her true identity.

Julia's actions are a paradigm of unmasking suspicious behavior. Valen- tine is caught up in the idealism of classical friendship as embodied in one of the "sources" for this play, the tale of Titus and Gisippus from The Governour (1531), Thomas Elyot's English courtesy book for the education of gentlemen.17 But that ideal has been vitiated in this play by Proteus's solipsistic abuse of it ("I to myself am dearer than a friend") and by Valentine's idealistic application of it in a case that is heartless, mindless, and self-preoccupied. The ring Julia "mistakenly" offers to Proteus reminds him of his promise to her, and the second ring reminds him of his infidelity, at the very moment Julia reveals her disguise. "It is the lesser blot, modesty finds," she tells him, with mild reproof and a passing allusion to the shape-changing god for which he is named, "Women to change their shapes than men their minds" (108-09). She comes back to him in her own shape when he comes back to her in his, now self-delivered (with some assistance from all three of his companions) from the world of falsehood into which he had banished himself. Julia's undeceiving of Valentine thus complements Valentine's forgiveness of Proteus as a solution to the problems (which are specifically moral problems) of this particular plot.



JOHN D. COX 47

In short, the difficulty in the denouement of Two Gentlemen is not forgiveness but the motive behind Valentine's apparently generous but deluded offer to give up his interest in Silvia. For this motive is not forgiveness but classical ethical theory: Cicero's DeAmicitia (which inspired Elyot) and beyond that Aristotle and Plato on ethical friendship, which always means friendship between two men and preferably between two gentlemen, because only noble character is capable of virtue.18 Proteus gives the lie to that assumption in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and so does Julia's (a woman's) correction of Valentine's mistake, so that her correction amounts, in effect, to Christian virtue's correction of its classical counterpart, because Christian virtue insistently cuts across social inequalities.19 Julia's suspicion of Valentine's offer to give up Silvia is no less Christian than Valentine's forgiveness of Proteus, with its explicit echoes of Chris- tian virtue: both result in the restoration of trust that had been destroyed by human duplicity and self-deception. It is easy to underestimate Julia's resolution of difficulties as merely romantic and secular, whereas morally it is equivalent to the renewed relationship between Valentine and Proteus, and it is no less important to a re-establishment of faith and trust than Valentine's extraordinary kindness to his friend.

The renewal of trust at the end of Two Gentlemen parallels the renewal of relationships at the end of all Shakespeare's comedies, whether they turn on forgiveness or not. Shakespeare's first venture into comedy may have been The Comedy of Errors (1590-94), where uncritical suspicion generates farce, as characters too readily believe the worst of others rather than recognizing the plain fact that two sets of identical twins have arrived in Ephesus without each other's knowledge. Shakespeare's indebtedness to Scot's Discovery of Witchcraft in this play makes more sense as a way of emphasizing suspicion about motives than endorsing skepticism per se, especially when the frame plot (which Shakespeare added to his Plautine source) is recognized as a qualification of classical esthetic assumptions in the main plot.20 The play's sober beginning in misunderstanding, strife, division, and the threat of death, is replaced at the end with understanding, reunion, and reconciliation. The closing lines convert our expectation of a standard pratfall (two clowns defer to each other before passing through a doorway and then collide) into a gesture of recognition, affec- tion, and mutual deference between one of the two sets of twins:

E. DROMIO Methinks you are my glass and not my brother. I see by you I am a sweet-faced youth. Will you go in to see their gossiping? S. DROMIO Not I, sir; you are my elder.




E. DROMIO That's a question. How shall we try it? S. DROMIO We'll draw cuts for the senior. Till then, lead thou first. E. DROMIO Nay, then, thus: We came into the world like brother and brother, And now let's go hand in hand, not one before another. (5.1.418-26)

With increasing sophistication, Shakespeare treats with suspicion not only the motives of vicious characters (like Proteus) but also the motives of the virtuous (like Valentine). The latter is particularly evident in The Merchant of Venice, where Portia eloquently describes the virtue of mercy and invokes Christian ethics explicitly as a model for the vengeful Shylock to follow:

Therefore, Jew, Though justice be thy plea, consider this, That in the course of justice none of us Should see salvation. We do pray for mercy, And that same prayer doth teach us all to render The deeds of mercy. (4.1.1 95-200)

Portia's argument is wholly orthodox in deriving Christian morality from Christian history. She does this by bringing the same appeal to mutual fallibility that we noticed earlier in the parable of the unforgiving servant and the Lord's prayer into conjunction with a theory of the atonement that interprets the crucifixion as cancellation of the debt humankind owes to God because of original sin.21 Portia's story itself, moreover, enacts another interpretation of the atonement: that God responded to the devil's trick of disguising himself as a serpent in the Garden of Eden by tricking the devil in disguise as a human being, whom the devil caused to be destroyed to the devil's own undoing (Cox, Shakespeare 128-32). The parallel is that Portia's disguise as a law clerk in the Venetian court tricks Shylock into demanding the very justice that undoes him in the end - and Shylock, as Barbara Lewalski points out, is associated with the devil no fewer than nine times in The Merchant of Venice.

The force of these parallels is undeniable, yet Shakespeare qualifies them in numerous ways that arouse suspicion about Portia's actions. Portia's racial slurs (1.2.127-29, 2.7.79), for example, parallel Proteus's in Two Gentlemen\ but more revealing is that the one whom Portia tricks in the Venetian law court is not the devil but a social and religious outsider, who credibly pleads his own humanity and cites the precedent of Christian behavior for his treatment of Christians:



JOHN D. COX 49

And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction. (3.1.62-69)

Compelling Shylock to convert to Christianity not only strips him of his identity but also does everything to persuade him that the ethical model Portia invokes in the courtroom should have no claim on him at all. Portia's coercing Shylock to join the Christian "feast" is a very different image from the celebratory departure of the Dromios to the "gossiping" at the end of The Comedy of Errors.

It seems fair, then, to conclude that Portia is inconsistent about the high ethical standard she invokes. Trickery and coercion based on legal hair splitting are more reminiscent of the unforgiving servant in the parable than of the forgiving master. Portia seems to forget her own fallibility when she enables Venice to perpetuate and enhance its harsh treatment of Shylock. We are right to think of her suspiciously.

It also seems fair, however, to ask whether The Merchant of Venice requires skepticism about Christian ethics in addition to suspicion about Christian behavior.22 Does Portia's imperfect representation of the standard she enunciates amount to skepticism about the standard itself? If it does, then mercy is no better than vengeance, because mercy is the standard Portia famously, if inconsistently, maintains. It is important, moreover, to avoid what Westphal facetiously calls "the Fonda fallacy" in a situation where one character appears to be "just as bad" as another. The Fonda in question is Jane, and Westphal names the fallacy for her trip to Hanoi during the Vietnam war: "Like many antiwar liberals during the late sixties and early seventies, she thought that if one side was evil, the other side must be good. Seeing the manifest evils of the American and South Vietnamese governments, they ended up canonizing Ho Chi Minh. In doing so they were repeating and reversing the logic of their teachers, the anti-Communist conservatives who concluded that since the Communists were evil, anything done in the name of anti-Communism must be good" (230). Reacting to Portia's inconsistency by making Shylock the hero of The Merchant of Venice is a perfect instance of the Fonda fallacy. Nothing in this play indicates that the world would be better with Shylock's ethic of vengeance than with Portia's of mercy, no matter how imperfectly Portia represents her pattern.

The Merchant of Venice is unusual in its explicit evocation of Christian affirmation, for in other plays that affirmation does not always use Chris-




tian language, apart from glancing biblical allusions, and understanding it does not require allegoresis or symbol-hunting.23 What is Christian about the thinking of Shakespeare's comic denouements is their acknowledg- ment that change is possible in human lives and therefore in human relationships: in effect, these comic endings make human trust analogous to, and dependent on, faith. The transformation, however, is always contingent, often imperfect, and the plays are not anagogical. While the comic turn at the end of Two Gentlemen, for example, suggests a satisfactory (and satisfying) resolution of suspicion in favor of trust, it is not a definitive resolution. To be sure, both Proteus and Valentine appear to have learned something that they badly needed to know, most of all about themselves, though Valentine does not acknowledge an error, as Proteus does, and Valentine's error, like Portia's, is therefore harder to detect. Given the importance of what they have learned, it would seem to be the kind of thing that will stay with them, constituting a substantial alteration in character that promises well for the future. But the play necessarily ex- cludes that future. While the denouement offers hope, then, it does not promise perfection. Suspicion has, for good reason, been set aside as the play ends, but everything about this play world says it has been set aside^r now, which is a very different matter from forever. Insofar as suspicion is appropriate to human motives and behavior, even at their best, suspicion still hovers in the background at the end of virtually every Shakespearean comedy, including later and more powerful comedies of forgiveness than The Two Gentlemen of Verona.

In one case, Troilus and Cressida (1601-03), Shakespeare experimented with a play in which suspicion is entirely unrelieved by faith, and which therefore highlights, by default, the importance of faith in other plays. This play is sometimes listed among the comedies, sometimes among the tragedies, and it is indeed hard to characterize, but at the very least it lacks any sense of the reconciling and redemptive denouements that typify Shakespearean comedy, and it lacks any effective character whom we can trust, as we can, say, Hamlet, Desdemona, Cordelia, or Macduff in the tragedies. Both Greeks and Trojans in Troilus and Cressida express magnifi- cent idealism, but all parties betray their ideals so insistently (often unaware that they are doing so) that the result is a pervasive mood of dispiriting cynicism, unrelieved by faithfulness, trust, or self-recognition of any kind. Ulysses's famous speech on "degree" (1.3.75-137), for example, which is certainly more Elizabethan than ancient Greek, is designed to goad Achilles into action by making him believe that his countrymen think more highly of Ajax than of him. In short, the speech issues in a ruse that



JOHN D. COX 51

comes close to violating the very principle that Ulysses magniloquently affirms. On the Trojan side, Hector speaks no less forcefully, chiding his brothers by comparing them to "young men, whom Aristotle thought / Unfit to hear moral philosophy" (2.2.166-67) and arguing strenuously against keeping Helen:

If Helen then be wife to Sparta's king, As it is known she is, these moral laws Of nature and of nations speak aloud To have her back returned. Thus to persist In doing wrong extenuates not wrong But makes it much more heavy. (2.2.183-88)

Having affirmed this, however, he capitulates in four and a half lines to the demands of Paris and Troilus, for the sake of "our joint and several dignities" (193). Shakespeare explicates Hector's deficient sense of "dig- nity" definitively in Troilus and Cressida by inventing a new way for Hector to die. Spying a Greek in "goodly armor" (5.8.2), Hector pursues and kills the man for his "hide" (5.6.31), and Achilles and his Myrmidons dispatch the Trojan hero easily when they find him unprepared because he is putting on the armor he has plundered (5.8). Hector is unaware that the lines he delivers to his dead victim apply ironically to himself: "Most putrified core, so fair without, / Thy goodly armor thus hath cost thy life" (5.8. 1-2). Hector is granted no tragic anagnorisis; he lives and dies without ever recognizing his dismal lack of self-knowledge.

Troilus and Cressida helps to illuminate Shakespeare's way of thinking religiously and morally by default, since it is the purest example of Shakespeare's using the satirical method of his fellow playwright, Ben Jonson.24 Jonson was a master of suspicion in the tradition of medieval dramatic satire, and his satires aim simply to expose human moral failings by making them irresistibly laughable.25 A paradigm of his method is the diseasing of Sir Politic Would-Be in Volpone (1606), after Sir Politic hides under a giant tortoise shell: "They pull off the shell and discouer him," reads Jonson's stage direction (5.4.74). The folly of the "scurvy politician," in Lear's phrase, is that he seems "To see the things [he does] not" (Lear 4.6. 1 7 1-72), and Sir Politic's pitifully inadequate attempt to hide becomes an emblem both of his slow-wittedness and of his easy vulnerability, despite his attempts to make himself impregnable. Like Shakespeare's Hector, Sir Politic learns nothing from his experience; it is enough that his folly is exposed and laughed at. As Thersites mockingly says of the Greek




generals in Troilus and Cressida: "the policy of those crafty swearing rascals . . . is not proved worth a blackberry" (5.4.9-12).

When Shakespeare uses Jonson's method in other plays, he qualifies it in ways that illuminate his own habitual combination of suspicion and faith. In Twelfth Night (1600-02), for example, the foolish steward Malvolio parallels Sir Politic Would-Be in many respects: he is ambitious, self-deceived, intolerant of others' vices while privately indulgent of his own, and he is exposed with delicious irony in the end. His final line speaks volumes about his inability to recognize his folly - let alone to change it - despite its hilarious revelation to everyone else: "I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you" (5.1.378). Yet the comic vengeance that others have visited on Malvolio is so excessive that it produces a very different result from the satirical ending of Volpone. "Alas, poor fool, how have they baffled thee," laments Olivia, the lady whom Malvolio serves, as she observes his final comeuppance (5.1.369). In part the line reflects her own illumination, since she has been too inclined to construe Malvolio 's hypocritical sober- ness as wisdom, and in part the line reflects Malvolio 's exposure as the fool he really is. Still, it is a complex moment, qualifying the comic triumph of Malvolio 's enemies in somewhat the same way that Portia's comic triumph over Shylock is qualified in The Merchant of Venice. Sir Toby Belch had gloated that "our very pastime" would "prompt us to have mercy on" Malvolio (3.4. 140-41), but Sir Toby's understanding of mercy is as partial as Portia's. The self-reflexive quality of virtue in such moments is reminiscent of the gospels' allusion to the "beam" and the "mote" in one's eye and one's neighbor's eye. Again, however, it is important to avoid the Fonda fallacy in reading Twelfth Night Olivia's self-understanding really is better than Malvolio 's determined self-deception, and the world of festivity she is drawn into almost against her will really is better than the deluded sober- ness she had indulged (suspiciously) at the outset. Shakespeare's readiness to make such distinctions and to allow his characters to be transformed in light of them is another way in which his comedy is different from Jonson's.26

Such distinctions, moreover, are not confined to comedy: a striking instance appears in King Lear (1608), though this example belongs to a distinctive class of characters who appear as early as Titus Andronicus (1 589- 94). The character in question is Edmund, illegitimate son of the earl of Gloucester; and the class Edmund belongs to was identified long ago by Bernard Spivack as derived from the morality play's personified abstrac- tion called "the Vice." At first these characters appear to have nothing suspicious about them, in the sense that "suspicion" is being used in this



JOHN D. COX 53

essay, because they conform so closely to the expectation of their homiletic origin: they are wantonly destructive, concerned about nobody's good but their own, unnervingly gleeful about the havoc they wreak in others' lives. Moreover, they are utterly frank (at least with us who watch their remarkable performances) about their intentions, their plans, and their perverse pleasure in the success of their plans. Because their breathtaking hypocrisy with their unsuspecting victims is always revealed to us, the audience, they conceal nothing about themselves, and in some cases their unsuspecting victims appear to be naive or even foolish as a consequence.27 Characters of this kind include Aaron in Titus Andronicus, Richard Duke of Gloucester (later King Richard III) in 3 Henry F/and Richard III, Don John in Much Ado about Nothing, Iago in Othello, Edmund in King Lear. They appear in every dramatic genre and in every period of Shakespeare's career, except the late romances.28

What makes these characters distinctive in Shakespeare's treatment is that he gives nearly all of them a credible social motive for their remark- ably anti-social behavior: Aaron is a black man in a white society; Richard has a misshapen body; Don John and Edmund are illegitimate sons. In each case, in other words, suspicion plays a part in the formation of these characters by hinting at a link between their vicious behavior and struc- tural flaws in the society that produced them. In Edmund's case, the link is forged in the play's opening lines, when Edmund's father, the Duke of Gloucester, jokes with Kent, in Edmund's hearing, about the circumstances of Edmund's conception: "though this knave came something saucily to the world before he was sent for, yet was his mother fair, there was good sport at his making, and the whoreson must be acknowledged" (1.1.21-24). Stanley Cavell's comment on these lines is compelling for its psychological and moral insight:

[Gloucester] recognizes the moral claim upon himself, as he says twice, to "acknowledge" that he has a bastard for a son. He does not acknowledge him, as a son or a person, with his feelings of illegitimacy and being cast out. That is something Gloucester ought to be ashamed of; his shame is itself more shameful than his one piece of licentiousness. (48)

Gloucester's lines strikingly reveal the father's responsibility for what the son has become, and that revelation is clearly the counterpart to what Shakespeare lets us see in the way of Lear's contribution to the characters of Goneril and Regan.

Complementing Cavell's understanding of Edmund's social formation is Jonathan Dollimore's, informed specifically by the suspicion of Marx: "Edmund's scepticism is made to serve an existing system of values; al-




though he falls prey to, he does not introduce his society to its obsession with power, property and inheritance; it is already the material and ideological basis of that society As such it informs the consciousness of Lear and Gloucester as much as Cornwall and Regan" (198). Insightful as this comment is about Edmund, it encounters the difficulty that among the nobility in King Lear is one whose actions are not motivated by power, property and inheritance but by something so much like Christian virtue that it is hard to know what else to call it, even though the play is set in pre- Christian Britain. That character, of course, is Cordelia. She is just as perceptive about her father's deficient sense of value at the play's outset as Edmund is about his father's, though her response is public refusal to behave according to her father's standard (a refusal that amounts to civil disobedience) rather than duplicitous cynicism and revenge. While it is possible to find a link between Edmund's viciousness and his society's treatment of him, it is not clear how Cordelia is thereby impugned, given that her moral indifference specifically to power, property, and inheritance extends to her own material ruin in the play's first scene.29 A fundamental asymmetry characterizes Edmund and Cordelia: while Edmund's viciousness undoubtedly owes something to his society's treatment of him, the same is not true for Cordelia's virtue, which is seemingly sui generis in the world of this play; at the very least, she did not derive it from her father. Again, moreover, it is important not to fall into the Fonda fallacy where Edmund is concerned. Important connections can indeed be established between Edmund's character and the society he rejects, but to make that society the excuse for his viciousness is to make Gloucester and Lear worse than Edmund, thus rendering Edmund a kind of heroic anti-hero, which Dollimore comes very close to doing.

As if to confirm that Edmund's formation may have less to do with skepticism than with a long tradition of Christian suspicion, consider John E Danby's comment: "Edmund is the careerist on the make, the New Man laying a mine under the crumbling walls and patterned streets of an ageing society that thinks it can disregard him. . . . Shakespeare's understanding of the type is so extensive as to amount to real sympathy. The insight comes, I think, from Shakespeare's being in part a New Man himself" (46, 48). Writing in the immediate aftermath of Tillyard's block- busters in the 1940s, Danby is such an idealizing critic of King Lear that he is hardly read anymore, yet his understanding of Edmund's character acknowledges not only the oppressiveness of coercive orthodoxy ("an ageing society") but also the personal stake of the playwright in the villain he creates. Skepticism is a possible explanation for Edmund, of course, but



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the conjunction of views about this character on the part of such different critics suggests that what we are looking at is not skepticism but rather suspicion, because Edmund is formed not only by the play's insistence on his father's moral contribution to what he has become but also by the playwright's seeming awareness of what market economics does to corrupt traditional familial ties. In both cases, the play critically examines the drawing of moralistic conclusions from moral premises.

As a final example of suspicion and faith in complex and complementary relationship, let us turn to two plays Shakespeare wrote at about the turn of the seventeenth century, both depicting a character in the act of Christian prayer. Formal private prayer is very rare in Shakespeare's plays - that is, language uttered knowingly and deliberately to God while the speaker is alone. All the more important, then, that these two examples appear in plays that are only a year or two apart in composition, and that both prayers are spoken by kings.

The first prayer comes from Henry F(1599), and its context is Henry's war in France. Trapped and heavily outnumbered by the French, Henry prays to God on the evening before the battle of Agincourt, one of the most celebrated victories in English history:

0 God of battles, steel my soldier's hearts; Possess them not with fear! Take from them now The sense of reckoning, ere th' opposed numbers Pluck their hearts from them. Not today, O Lord, O, not today, think not upon the fault My father made in compassing the crown! 1 Richard's body have interred new, And on it have bestowed more contrite tears Than from it issued forced drops of blood. Five hundred poor I have in yearly pay Who twice a day their withered hands hold up Toward heaven, to pardon blood; and I have built Two chantries, where the sad and solemn priests Sing still for Richard's soul. More will I do; Though all that I can do is nothing worth, Since that my penitence comes after all, Imploring pardon. (4.1.287-303)

Since virtually every auditor who witnesses this prayer knows the outcome of the battle, it seems to be a self-evident and uncomplicated example of God answering prayer positively: Shakespeare wrote a prayer for Henry that the playwright knew would be answered in Henry's favor.




Several features of the prayer, however, demand that it be regarded with suspicion. The prayer involves four thoughts: (1) Henry asks God to give his soldiers courage; (2) he asks God to overlook the means by which Henry's father gained the throne (Henry IV forcefully overthrew his predecessor, Richard II); (3) he reminds God of what he has already done for Richard's soul; (4) he promises to do even more but acknowledges that he can never do enough. The move from the first of these thoughts to the second is sudden and surprising, and the connection seems to be the phrase "the sense of reckoning." Referring immediately to the disparity in size between the English and French forces ("reckoning" as enumeration), the phrase also refers to the debt Henry owes God ("reckoning" as ac- counting of a sum owed).30 The prayer thus links the soldiers and their possible lack of courage to Henry and his guilt - no other word will describe it - as possible impediments to Henry's military success. The second is clearly more serious to him than the first, judging from the amount of time he devotes to each of them; and since he nowhere else mentions his guilt, it seems that he is baring his soul before God in a way that he never does elsewhere. If we ask what motivates this soul-baring, however, it emerges as more self-deceived than self-revealing, because this part of the prayer is just as clearly linked to victory as the first part. That is, when Henry acknowledges that he is in debt to God but asks God to overlook that debt in the coming battle, the implication is clear: a victory will be the sign that God overlooked the debt. Henry both admits his guilt, then, and withdraws his admission at the same time by bargaining with God not to act in a way that would recognize the guilt and therefore be inconvenient to Henry in the present circumstances.

This seems to be one implication of his closing lines, in which he promises to do even more for Richard's soul and then concedes (with apparent frankness and piety) that "all that I can do is nothing worth, / Since that my penitence comes after all." As Gary Taylor points out, these are richly ambiguous lines, depending on what the second "all" means: everything Henry has done (to assuage his guilt), everything Henry can still do (to assuage it), everything his father did (to incur the guilt in the first place).31 It is important to note that the third possibility can mean something more as well (and it follows logically from what Henry has just been saying): "all" can mean everything Henry V has gained and hopes to gain as king, including the conquest of France. Taken this way, Henry is admitting that as long as he stands to gain from his father's guilty action, he can do nothing to assuage that guilt except "implore pardon." This request too, however, is disingenuous and self-deceived, for Henry again



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hopes to retain the very thing that he acknowledges, before God, he should not have.

One way of reading Henry's prayer is that it invites skepticism about all prayer. As Stanley Cavell remarks in another context, "the problem with prayers is not that few are answered but that all are, one way or the other" (80). Cavell seems to mean that since the answer to prayer is in the eye of the beholder - since the knowledge that a prayer has been answered (or not) depends on how one interprets the outcome - the answer is not knowledge at all; it is at best unsubstantiated opinion, originating in wish- fulfillment or fear. But the problem with Henry's prayer is not how to interpret its answer: he prays for God to remove the impediments to victory, and he gets a resounding victory. This is an interpretation that even the French would have a hard time disbelieving, and Henry would obviously delight in their belief. The conclusion that the prayer as Shakespeare penned it (knowing the result, of course) arouses skepticism about all prayer seems far less certain than that the prayer raises questions about Henry's motivation. Shakespeare more clearly invites suspicion of this king's motive in praying than skepticism about prayer per se.

Reinforcing this point is Henry's declaration of what he has done to assuage his guilt for Richard's death. Prayers for the dead were a central point of contention between Catholics and Protestants, and chantries had been banned by Edward VI in 1547 (the ban was renewed by Edward's sister Elizabeth - still reigning when Shakespeare wrote Henry V- - after her accession in 1558).32 Shakespeare could have included this detail for historical effect, of course: Henry V lived and died long before the Reformation, so he knew nothing of the Protestant controversy and in fact was a determined defender of the traditional church against the proto- Reformers called Lollards. But historical effect is highly unusual in Shakespeare's history plays. In fact, this is the only detail in Henry Fthat definitively distinguishes Henry from a Protestant king of England (Cox, Shakespeare, 104-27). Moreover, prayers for the dead invited some of the bitterest attacks against traditional religion in England. Simon Fish's anony- mous little book, A Supplication/or the Beggars (1529) argued sarcastically that the problem of dire poverty in England could be resolved by taking the money lavished on chantries and distributing it among the destitute (Greenblatt, Hamlet 10-46). Shakespeare perhaps glances at Fish's point in his phrase "five hundred poor," since the number of poor people in England in 1599 (as in 1529) far exceeded 500, and if that is all Henry's chantries are helping, then they are contributing very little to the problem of poverty, and what little they are doing is designed to enhance Henry's




position before God more than it is designed to relieve the poor. In short, the vaguely anti-Catholic detail in Henry's prayer links it with the kind of strategic skepticism (more accurately labeled "suspicion," I would argue) that we have glanced at in Hooker, Scot, and Harsnett.

The other king's prayer is offered (or almost offered) by Claudius in Hamlet (1601), and it functions virtually as a commentary on the prayer in Henry V, though paradoxically (for a play as fraught with ironic uncertainty as Hamlet) this prayer moves its auditors in the direction of faith rather than suspicion. Claudius's rhetorical question, "May one be pardoned and retain th' offense?" is the thematic link between the two kings' prayers, and it summarizes Claudius's reasoning in the lines that precede it:

But O, what form of prayer Can serve my turn? "Forgive me my foul murder"? That cannot be, since I am still possessed Of those effects for which I did the murder: My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen. (Hamlet, 3.3.51-55)

Insofar as Henry V's second "all" (in "More will I do; / Though all that I can do is nothing worth, / Since that my penitence comes after all") means "all I have gained by my father's guilty accession to the throne and my own determined extension of royal power," Henry V means the same thing Claudius says - that one may not be pardoned as long as one retains the fruits of the offense. But Claudius says something else that helps to interpret Henry's prayer:

In the corrupted currents of this world Offense's gilded hand may shove by justice, And oft 'tis seen the wicked prize itself Buys out the law. But 'tis not so above. There is no shuffling, there the action lies In his true nature, and we ourselves compelled, Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults, To give in evidence. (3.3.57-64)

This is a point that Henry V never acknowledges, in his prayer or other- wise: that whereas wealth and power in "this world" may "shove by justice," with God "there is no shuffling." "Shuffling" describes precisely what Henry V does in his prayer: it is the perfect word to describe suspicion when it involves the evasion of self-consciousness.

The searing honesty of Claudius's soliloquy not only contrasts with Henry's torturous avoidance of the truth but also ironically provides a bedrock of certainty in Hamlet. For Claudius's soliloquy is the only firm



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evidence (Claudius uses the word himself) in the play that he is guilty of old Hamlet's death: "O, my offense is rank! It smells to heaven, / It hath the primal eldest curse upon 't, / A brother's murder" (3.3.36-38).33 Hamlet eventually comes to mistrust the ghost as evidence (2.2.599-605), and his next recourse (the play-within-the-play) clarifies nothing, despite Hamlet's confidence that it does. He specifically identifies the murderer in The Murder of Gonzago as "one Lucianus, nephew to the King" (3.2.242) and therefore directly parallel to Prince Hamlet himself. To everyone who is not privy to the king's guilt (i.e., to everyone but Claudius himself, with the possible exception of Gertrude), Claudius's response to the play would obviously indicate his fear of a coup d'etat on the part of his nephew. To everyone but Claudius, The Murder of Gonzago thus functions in the same way that a command performance of Richard II functioned historically on the eve of the earl of Essex's rebellion in 1601: as an ambitious rival's attempt to intimidate the monarch. The weight of apparent evidence against Hamlet is increased by the fact that Claudius nowhere says anything to indicate his suspicion that Hamlet knows about old Hamlet's murder, though Claudius obviously must suspect it after he has seen the play. Since Claudius knows nothing about the ghost, he has no reason to suspect that Hamlet knows before the staging of The Murder of Gonzago, After the play, Claudius says nothing to indicate that he thinks Hamlet knows, presumably because his political fear of Hamlet as a rival overrides his fear of Hamlet as one who has somehow found out the truth about the murder. Claudius's infallible political instincts seem to make him aware that he is safest to carry on as if no one else suspects him, even if Hamlet does. His ordering Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on Hamlet and his abetting Laertes's attempts at vengeance both seem explicable in terms of the king's fear of Hamlet as a rival, no matter how old Hamlet died. Claudius possibly fears discovery, as any murderer does, though he never admits his fear, but he certainly fears rivalry, as any ambitious politician must, and he says so repeatedly.

In short, without Claudius's admission of guilt, the principal question in criticism of Hamlet would not be why Hamlet delays but whether or not the king is guilty. His obvious statement of his guilt, unobjectionable to Chris- tians of any persuasion who saw the play in 1601, is arguably the most important passage in the play. It substantiates the ghost's claim, if not the particulars of the ghost's description.34 It definitively clarifies his response to The Murder of Gonzago and his earlier aside about his guilty conscience. It helps to vindicate Hamlet's course of action, given the ghost's injunction. It blackens him irrevocably, because it shows him in a moment of absolute




candor, considering a radical change in his life, yet ultimately unable to give up what he has already gained by murdering his brother, seducing his brother's wife, and convincing courtiers to believe him. Only by relying on an audience's belief in the possibility of honest repentance and a radical change of life can Shakespeare clarify not only Claudius's spiritual peril and desperate failure but the reality of Hamlet's situation as well. At this particular moment in Hamlet, faith overwhelms suspicion - at least for us who hear Claudius's thoughts about prayer.

The irony, of course, is that Hamlet hears neither those thoughts nor Claudius's admission that his attempt to pray is ineffectual. Hamlet re- frains from killing Claudius in the belief that the kneeling Claudius is repenting, whereas Claudius's attempt to repent is unsuccessful. Hamlet lacks our definitive knowledge of Claudius's guilt, because Hamlet does not hear Claudius's confession. Missing Claudius's admission that his prayer is empty means that Hamlet fails to act because of false confidence that what he sees (an act of repentance) is what he thinks it is. These are all ironies that defeat Hamlet and deepen his tragedy, but Shakespeare gives us knowledge that he withholds from Hamlet, and our knowledge makes all the difference. Claudius is no skeptic; he is a consummately clever and determined sinner, and Hamlet is right to suspect him:

O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain! My tables - meet it is I set it down That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain. (1.5.107-09)

We know with absolute certainty that Hamlet is right to suspect Claudius, however, because we are granted knowledge that only Claudius and God know, and it is knowledge that definitively reveals Claudius's suspicious duplicity - though to Hamlet that duplicity is unproven. The king's admission is what makes Hamlet more than a remarkable esthetic achievement: it makes the play a challenging vision of human uncertainty in a distinctively religious setting that is charged with profound moral seriousness.

Skepticism is less the issue in Hamlet, then, than suspicion, as I have argued for other plays by Shakespeare as well. If this argument offers anything innovative, it is a suggestion that suspicion in Shakespeare not only complements faith but derives from it, and the point of making such an argument is that it helps to place Shakespeare's thinking historically. It helps to clarify that he was indeed a thinker, first of all, that his thinking is consistent with his time and place (though by no means confined to it), and that the quality of his thinking is consistent with his imagining human beings in action and interaction, which is what dramatists do. What his



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characters conceal and what they reveal (both from and to themselves as well as others) is at the heart of his dramatic enterprise. Shakespeare may well be said to have had the same gift Nietzsche claimed for himself: an "uncanny sensitivity ... for truthfulness, so that the innermost part, the entrails ... of every soul are smelledby him" (Cavell 186). Nietzsche also, of course, inherited a tradition of classical and Christian thinking, and he was unusually perceptive about the dismal uses to which people put that heritage. Like Jonson, however, Nietzsche was inclined to expose and to mock. Something more than that, I would urge, is going on in Shakespeare's thinking.

Hope College

NOTES

1. Wordsworth does not mention Shakespeare, but he distinguishes "human and dramatic Imagination" from "the prophetic and lyrical parts of the Holy Scriptures, and the works of Milton; to which I cannot forbear to add those of Spenser" (34). I owe this reference to Marx (2). Wordsworth's view is now the dominant view, but perhaps the most recent and influential advocate of it is Dollimore.

2. Milton, "L' Allegro" 1 33-34. George Steiner argues that Ludwig Wittgenstein held a similar view of Shakespeare, perhaps influenced by Milton, and Steiner seems inclined to that view himself.

3. Frye and Elton. Among many classic studies of Shakespeare's thought, those who incline toward the "idealist" side include Curry, Spencer, Tillyard, and Whitaker. More skeptical are Cavell, Chaudhuri, Dollimore, and Elton.

4. Westphal 14. Westphal borrows the concept of suspicion from Ricoeur. Stated in these terms, Cavell might well be described as suspicious rather than skeptical, especially given his interest in Freud, but "skepticism" is the name he has chosen for his own ideas, which he identifies as "a late stage in the progress of skepticism in the West, that history... that begins no later than Descartes and Shakespeare" (35).

5. Freudian and Marxist critics long since initiated a tradition of reading the motives and behavior of Shakespeare's characters suspiciously, of course; the difference I am suggesting is to begin with sixteenth-century, rather nineteenth-century, assumptions, and to move beyond the confines of particular recent theories and methods. What I am proposing, in other words, is closer to religious and moral philosophy than to Freudian psychology or Marxian materialism per se. For Shakespearean criticism that takes both Freud and Shakespeare's Christian heritage seriously, see Kirsch.

6. The critical literature on Shakespeare and Montaigne is vast and inconclusive. Montaigne's own thought is notoriously difficult to interpret, and his influence on Shakespeare is likely to have been late: Florio's translation was not published until 1603,




and the least disputed reference is in The Tempest (1611). For Harsnett and Scot, see Greenblatt and Strier.

7. On Harsnett, see Brownlow 35-66; on Scot, Clark 144-45, 182, 192-93, 249, 296. Dollimore comments that "blasphemy and scoffing were often a refusal of religiously mystified authority" (279 n. 1), but his observation does not do justice to those like Scot and Harsnett (and I would add Jonson and later Swift), who scoffed in defense of "religiously mystified authority."

8. Both the playwright Thomas Kyd and the government agent Richard Baines testified that Marlowe made scoffing remarks: "That Christ was a bastard and his mother dishonest," for example, or "That all they that loue not Tobacco & Boies were fooles" (quoted Kocher 35). Such remarks, however, do not seem designed to be philosophically serious.

9. "The First Part of the Sermon of Repentance" (Griffiths 533). 10. My point is not that Shakespeare was necessarily influenced by Peele but that what

I am claiming about suspicion was vital in Shakespeare's culture, including the culture of contemporary drama.

1 1. Book of Common Prayer 51, 59 (morning prayer), 61 (evening prayer). The story of the unforgiving servant was read as the Gospel on the twenty-second Sunday after Trinity, and the corresponding Epistle was Philippians 1.3-11, with its visionary prayer that in the church at Philippi love will "increase yet more and more in knowledge, and in all understanding, that ye may accept the things that are most excellent" (209). The Collect for that day may well have been designed to assist the dull preacher who did not see the complementary emphases on love and forgiveness in the Episde and Gospel: "Lord, we beseech thee to keep thy household the Church in continual godliness; that through thy protection it may be free from all adversities, and devoudy given to serve thee in good works, to the glory of thy name; through Jesus Christ our Lord."

12. On Augustine and Hobbes, with regard to both human nature and politics, see Deane 1, 46-47, 50, 56, 59, 117, 144, 234-36.

13. Shuger, Habits 27-28. For a similar argument on another theme, see Shuger, "Subversive." Tillyard was extraordinarily influential in arguing that Hooker's insistence on hierarchy supplied a parallel - almost a key - to reading Shakespeare. He certainly influenced Whitaker, who made Troilus and Cressida central to his narrative of Shakespeare's intellectual development, because "The metaphysics behind" that development "finally comes to explicit statement in Ulysses's speech on degree" (195).

14. On the polemical context of Hooker's theology, see Lake 145-238, and Cargill Thompson.

15. The plays Hunter discusses are The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1599-93), Much Ado about Nothing ( 1 598- 1 600), All's Well That Ends Well ( 1 60 1 -04), Measure for Measure ( 1 603-04), Cymbeline (1608-1 1), The Winter's Tale (1610-1 1), and The Tempest (1609-1 1). He does not note that one of Shakespeare's most powerful comedies of forgiveness is built deeply into the fabric of King Lear (1605), though King Lear itself does not belong to the genre.

16. Shakespeare's only other allusion to Proteus is in Richard of Gloucester's soliloquy in 3 Henry VI: "I can add colors to the chameleon, / Change shapes with Proteus for advantages, / And set the murderous Machiavel to school" (3.2.191-93).

17. Bullough 1.212-17. I put "sources" in quotation marks to avoid the implication that Shakespeare's plays mean the same thing as their sources, which is seldom, if ever, true.



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1 8. Aristotle argues that true friendship is not possible between husband and wife, for example, because true friendship is not possible between unequals (Mchomachean Ethics 1 158b). Spenser was either ignorant of Aristotle's argument, or he deliberately departed from it, in the friendship of Artegal and Britomart in Book IV of The Faerie Queene.

1 9. On the contrast between the classical and Christian responses to social inequality (at least in theory and therefore in medieval art and literature), see Auerbach.

20. The argument for skepticism is made by Strier, 171-76. Strier's remark that "Everyone would have done better if they had done without theories of miracle and supernatural causation" (175) is precisely the view of the established church in England and the view that Scot is at pains to defend. For the contrast between frame and main plots, see Cox, Shakespeare 63-66.

21. As Frye points out, Shakespeare three times fully describes this view of the atonement in other plays: 2 Henry VI, Richard III, and Measure for Measure (120-22). For succinct lyric treatment of the atonement in an extended metaphor of literal indebtedness, see George Herbert's "Redemption."

22. This, in effect, is what Steven Marx argues (103-24). 23. Marx notes that "The Merchant of Venice contains more biblical allusions than any

other play by Shakespeare" (104). 24. Much speculation has gone into the possibility that Shakespeare used Jonson's

method to satirize Jonson himself in Troilus and Cressida. For a summary of the arguments, see Bevington's edition of Troilus and Cressida (6-11).

25. For Jonson's debt to medieval drama, see Dessen, and for the religious basis of medieval dramatic satire, see Cox, Devil 60-8 1 .

26. Even if one allows that in the end we feel for Volpone some of the complexity that we feel for Malvolio, Jonson's play offers nothing that corresponds believably to the illumination of Olivia and Orsino. In effect, the community that expels Volpone is as corrupt as Volpone himself, whereas Twelfth Night insists on the difference (which is arguably a moral difference) between Malvolio and those on whom he wishes vengeance in the end. If their rejection of him is too cruel, his rejection of them is too sweeping.

27. This is particularly true of Othello. See Auden 246-72. 28. Iachimo in Cymbeline comes close, and his name is virtually a diminutive of Iago's,

but Iachimo has no revealing soliloquies, he does not gloat about his success, and he repents and is forgiven in the end.

29. To be sure, the King of France offers to marry her, but he uses the language of Christian paradox in doing so (1.1.254-65), and it is clear not only that his offer is impulsive and gratuitous but that Cordelia cannot be supposed to have imagined such an end, let alone aimed to achieve it.

30. Williams has just used "reckoning" in the second sense, in his debate with King Henry (who is in disguise) on the king's responsibility for the death and injury of his men (4.1.135). See also 1 Henry IV, 1.2.48 and 3.2.152, where a similar wordplay appears on "reckoning."

3 1 . Taylor 295-30 1 . Taylor argues that none of these alternatives is clear or satisfactory, and he therefore emends "all" to "ill," but the chief value of his long note is to show that three meanings of "all" are indeed present in Henry's lines, that the emendation is therefore unnecessary, and that the confused phrasing has more to do with Henry's suspicious special pleading than with the playwright's (or compositor's) mistake.




32. The contention over prayers for the dead is central to Greenblatt's argument (Hamlet); Greenblatt also interprets Henry V's prayer as an attempt to bargain with God (21-22).

33. Claudius's earlier aside is sometimes cited as evidence as well:

O 'tis too true! How smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience! The harlot's cheek, beautied with plastering art, Is not more ugly to the thing that helps it Than is my deed to my most painted word. O heavy burden! (3.1.49-55)

What these lines prove, however, is that Claudius has a guilty conscience, and without the later prayer, one could argue that what he feels guilty about is his "o'erhasty marriage," as Gertrude guiltily calls it (2.2.57).

34. Greg convinced himself that the manner of old Hamlet's death is a figment of young Hamlet's imagination, and his argument prompted Wilson's influential response. Cavell has recendy revived and defended Greg's reading on Freudian grounds (180-82).

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Shakespeare's Religious and Moral Thinking: Skepticism or Suspicion?